Well it definitely feels odd trying to condense 29 years of life into a bitesize chunk. But I’ll give it my best shot!

So I grew up in Swindon and George grew up in Rochdale. I went to primary school, secondary school, and college all within a 20 min walk from my house and I saw myself as pretty independent growing up. George and I both chuckled to ourselves when we found out we were both the organisers amongst our friendship groups!

Two weeks before I was 16 I got myself an interview for a suit shop in Swindon Designer Outlet Village as I wanted to earn money for University. So I worked a lot throughout college and did my best to get predicted grades of AAB to go to the University of Southampton to study Information Technology.

During this time period, George was working hard to get his predicted grades to go to The University of York. And what happened? We both missed our grades. So George accepted his second choice and I went through clearing. And that’s what led us to the University of Reading.

When you don’t get your first choice, you don’t get to choose your accommodation. You can pick from the few that are left. We both couldn’t spend that much on our accommodation but we also didn’t want to go catered so we did end up choosing one that was more than we’d hoped but I guess we knew we’d figure it out one way or another!

Someone out there was watching over us as they selected us to be the room next to each other in our halls. But ironically we didn’t really speak to each other much for the first couple of months. It was when the parties had died down a little and we found what normal now looked like at University that we got talking. And so in March 2014, we officially became boyfriend and girlfriend. And throughout University, there wasn’t a time period where we didn’t live together! We even had a joint account in our name for the house we shared with 8 others in our second year of University!

Looking back at this period of our lives, I don’t think we’d even recognise who we are now. We drank and partied a lot! We didn’t care for the environment and ate absolute crap. Exercise definitely came second… or maybe third… and I’ve just got to thank my poor body for pulling through I guess! But we did have a really great time at University and both look back on it with smiles on our faces.

So post Uni we were not sure what the world had in store for us but we knew whatever it was we wanted to do it together. I’d been offered a job full time at the software company I’d been working for part time whilst at University as an Operations Manager so I took that up. There was no office base so it meant I could be pretty flexible with where I worked. And George decided to do a PGCE to train to be a secondary school Maths teacher which was up in Manchester.

When looking for places to live, we looked at both Swindon and Rochdale and having rented for the past 4 years at Uni we decided we wanted to buy. With house prices in the south of England being WAY more than the north, we had our eyes on Lancashire. We decided that with six months of saving, along with George’s incredible bursary for doing a Maths PGCE (it was something like £25k!?), it would be possible to buy. So after three months of keeping our eye on the market, we found our home in Bacup.

It was a house that could be lived in right away but we knew we wanted to make our mark on it so over the six years we ended up living there we transformed it to a completely different house! George’s creativity really came to life as he had incredible ideas of how to level up our house. The loft being my favourite of his ideas.

That’s not the only big change that happened that month either. April 2018 just so happened to become the month we became dog parents, and ran our first marathon! Bruce popped up on gumtree when George was on the hunt for a doggo (little to my knowledge!). But I couldn’t be more grateful that Bruce came into our lives. He was an absolute terror for maybe the first year… or two.. and a lot of people told me at the field we walk him at, “He’ll be an incredible dog one day”. Bruce is 6 and a half now and he is an absolutely amazing dog. We don’t feel complete without him. He’s still a little terror at times but a little terror we adore.

And so that brings you pretty much up to speed with our journey and the rest can be found on project matcha which includes all the juicy van deets too!